FESCo wants to ban direct stable pushes in Bodhi (urgent call for feedback)

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 02/27/2010 05:27 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-02-27 at 10:57 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>
>>> Sorry, I was replying in haste. I should've made clear that I was
>>> talking more in general, and don't have any specific direct knowledge of
>>> the dnssec case. I know of multiple cases where updates have been pushed
>>> hastily, but I don't have any direct knowledge of the dnssec case
>>> specifically and wouldn't want to cast any aspersions in anyone's
>>> direction there.
>>>
>> Well, to voting is an inadequate means for judging a package's quality,
>> because bugs showing in individual cases are not co-related to "works
>> for many" - It's a fundamental flaw of the system.
>
> Yeah, it's not perfect: there are cases where we have, say, a complex
> kernel update which works fine for most people but causes a significant
> regression for some particular bit of hardware. We wouldn't want to put
> that update out, but it's easy for it to get five +1s before someone
> with the specific bit of hardware comes by and gives it a -1...and even
> then, +4 looks good if you're not reading the feedback too carefully.
>
> So yeah, I agree it's not a perfect system - detailed suggestions for
> improving it would be welcome, I'm sure.

Alternatives:

* Abandon it (I don't think this would change anything wrt. to QA in Fedora)

* Replace it by a "free text comment system"

* In cases an update is trying to address a particular bug in BZ, 
replace let people comment in bugzilla.

> I don't think 'not perfect' is
> the same as 'useless', though.
In general, I would agree, but in this particular case, I do think it is 
useless.

All the voting/karma stuff does is to let rel-eng believe to be dealing 
with bad updates, while it actually doesn't cope with the problems it is 
trying to address, it's the wrong tool.

> I think it's pretty easy to make a case
> that Bodhi has had a significant positive impact on the overall quality
> of the updates that have fully utilized it.
Well, the only positive impact bodhi had on me was bodhi implementing a 
more or less usable web-frontend, where Fedora had nothing in place 
before. This doesn't mean it is a good system and even less does this 
mean this system is perfect or bug-free.

Ralf